Pianist provides exciting moments

BANGOR – Amiable and informal, the Husson College Piano Series in the intimate Kominsky Auditorium in Peabody Hall could give chamber music a good name. Audience and performers are reasonably close together, acoustics are good (the listening is easy) and a musician can talk about the program if he or she feels like it.

That’s how it was Monday night when Horia Mihail, a young native of Romania who is now on the piano faculty at Boston University, performed. Although the evening turned out to be less than thrilling, there was solid evidence of fine technique plus empathy with the composers, along with some exciting moments.

Casual in a black suit and black shirt without a tie, Mikhail explained that he was tired from a demanding concert tour (he had played the night before in Topeka, Kan.) but would do his best. He then spoke about his program opener, the 32 “Diabelli Variations” which, he said, Beethoven had written “in his early years.”

Well, not quite. Beethoven, who died at the age of 56, was 49 in 1819 when an Austrian music publisher, Anton Diabelli, wrote a little eight-measure waltz theme which he sent to about 50 composers, including Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and the child prodigy Franz Liszt. Each was invited to write a variation on the Diabelli theme, which they did, except for Beethoven, who wrote 32 varied, colorful and challenging variations. They are playful and clever; they sound as if they’d been written by a young composer, full of life.

So Diabelli published the Beethoven variations separately, which became a classic. The set of the other composers, one variation each, came out later, and is all but forgotten.

Mihail gave the music the youthful vitality it requires, while also seeming to just hurry it along. Even a pause of a few seconds between variations would have helped point up their interesting differences. Tone was crisp and the variation forms were well defined.

Mihail’s three Scarlatti sonatas were satisfying if not quite stirring. While that music is intended to enchant rather than “wow” an audience, it can be played more airily than it was.

On a program which otherwise ignored the 20th century, Czech composer Leos Janacek (1854-1928) was a welcome addition. Although he lived the major part of his life in the era of 19th century Romanticism, his “Sonata 1.X. 1905” combines that kind of diatonic melody with the mild dissonances and cadences of the new Modernism (as of a century ago). Mihail’s performance was revealing and sensitive.

While the soloist remained true to the dance feeling in Chopin’s two mazurkas on the program, they might have been played with more flair, more contour, more roundness of tone. As he had warned earlier, Mihail was tired.

Nevertheless, he bounced back for a resounding finish, celebrating the vigor of Franz Liszt’s sonata in the form of a fantasia, “Apres une Lecture du Dante.” He played with Lisztian virtuosity, to the admiration of his audience.